Imagine walking into the forest for the first time.
And when you go into this forest,
You see what looks like apparent chaos.
You see a forest floor that's all dirty.
The rocks are mixed in with the grass,
The bugs are fighting each other.
You have dead animals on the ground,
Rotting in decay.
Some things smell terrible.
Trees are falling over.
It looks like an absolute mess.
How easy is it to walk in the forest and say,
Somebody should clean this up?
We need to separate the rocks from the grass.
This tree fell over.
Let's stand it back up.
Let's put some duct tape around it.
Let's stop the insects from fighting.
We'll put together some committees.
Let's just get everyone doing what I think they should do.
Then the forest can finally be at peace.
And then you take a step back and you look at the whole damn thing.
Maybe from a profound moment of stillness,
Like you're not zoomed in on one aspect,
But you see the whole forest.
And you say,
My God,
This is beautiful.
Everything in the forest is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing so that the forest can be the forest.
And when I see the totality of the forest,
There's a trust in the design.
There's something that has figured this out for life to be life.
It needs to be the way that it is.
And my God,
When I see the forest,
It's beautiful.
Sure,
There are things that smell bad.
Sure,
There's muddy water sometimes.
But then there is life.
And you see in this analogy of the forest and in the analogy of looking at society,
It's the same with looking at yourself.
You can zoom in on aspects of your life and say,
Oh,
This is a mess.
If only it was the way that I wanted it to be,
Then I could love it.
Oblivious to the possibility that it's exactly how it was supposed to be.
And the suffering that's being experienced isn't because of how it is,
But it's because of the resisting what is.
It's because of the judgment of what is.
The withholding of love,
The demand that it be different.
And so the question is,
Wait,
Do you really see what you are?
Do you see the totality?
Or are you having a tantrum because you didn't get what you think you wanted?
Thinking that you're missing something when you clearly don't see the big picture of what you are.
Responding to the comment of,
In all fairness,
The squirrels didn't vote in the fox.
In all fairness,
I would also say that the squirrel is not separate from the fox.
It's kind of like saying that the leaves didn't get a vote in falling from the tree.
The leaf is the tree.
See,
That's the thing we can do.
We can look in the forest and we can say all of these things are separate from each other.
There's this,
And there's that,
And then there's 10,
000 things.
They're all separate.
But when you step back,
Don't you see that it's just one thing?
Right?
Just like the tree.
The tree can have a hundred branches,
And you can give all of those branches different names and assign a life to each of those branches.
As if it's not all just the tree.
It's so fascinating that we do that as human beings.
We separate things into 10,
000 separate pieces that aren't really separate pieces.
Which is just 10,
000 separate stories.
Separate stories of separate identities that don't really exist.
In the same way that my idea of myself as a separate someone is just an idea.
It's just a story.
And that person in the story,
Who I think I am,
Doesn't really exist.
And we can just entirely live our lives from that story.
And that's fine.
Because the realness of you is unaffected by it all.
In the same way that when a tree falls down in the forest,
The forest is unaffected.
Gosh,
This goes in such a sacred direction where.
.
.
I mean,
The obvious pointer here for me is to see that we as human beings,
Existing in our image of separation,
Have turned away from the true source of it all.
We have abandoned our true identity in service of an imaginary sense of self-importance.
And we become so frustrated in our inability to protect that self-importance.
And we try so hard and we fight so hard to protect that character in our minds.
And all the while,
There's this very sweet invitation that says,
My dear,
See what's true.
See that you are not this person dancing around in your mind.
I wonder,
Honestly,
To what degree you hear me when I say these things.
Like,
I wonder to what degree you see that this separate person that you think you are only exists in thought and has no basis in reality at all.
In the same way that you can stand in the forest and give everything a name,
But all of your names are completely imaginary.
You're not defining anything.
And furthermore,
Can you see,
Or to what degree can you see,
That all of the human suffering is wrapped around this character trying to survive?
Is wrapped around this character that refuses to submit to the truth of what is.
And it's not a judgment at all.
It's absolutely adorable and understandable.
Because it's like we're dreaming and we don't know that we're dreaming.
But as you're dreaming,
It's fine because the reality of you is untouched by the dream.
So even though you're dreaming,
Nothing's actually happening to you.
